The present invention relates generally to processing systems for collecting, processing, and presenting data, as well as monitoring business processes. More particularly, the invention relates to data processing systems for collecting consumer sales and marketing data, performing data analysis, and presenting the results of the analysis.
Data analysis systems are common in enterprise resource planning and performance management systems. For example, an exemplary system for collecting, analyzing and reporting corporate tax and financial information is disclosed in US Application Publication No. US 2007/0022026 A1, entitled Tax Scorecard Reporting System, to Davidson et al. Such systems may be available for analyzing and reporting many different types of corporate information. However, busy executives are overloaded with information from numerous systems reporting data of all kinds. Executives need a complete but concise and timely view of key performance trends across the business to verify operational targets and analyze performance to determine changes to operations to achieve optimum profitability. The information necessary to gain insight in a competitive marketplace requires input from not only a company's operations, but also from the marketplace players—competitors and consumers. Accordingly, there is a need for more sophisticated systems for data integration and analysis that can manage the increased information flow from internal and external sources. Accordingly, there is a need for managing the input from multiple different systems, integrating the information to provide a single data source of high integrity, and delivering the precise information in a timely and accessible manner to business executives at all levels of the enterprise. Also, there is a need for a system to provide sophisticated analysis of the information to provide insights into a company's performance to allow the executives to make effective decisions.